Page:Logic Taught by Love.djvu/69

fatigue caused by the destruction of ancient landmarks. A cultivated mind shrinks indeed from acknowledging as the substance of its faith any more of Truth than so much as it has made its own; but the limit of personal faith is not necessarily that of historical knowledge. Unity of thought is promoted, and the process of self-culture enormously facilitated, by having always at hand in one's memory, in a compact form, the best results of the mental labour of preceding ages. A creed or formulary acts as what Hinton called "an unconscious constant"; a crystallizing thread round which atoms of knowledge may gradually gather, instead of being swept away by every current of thought, or retained only by vehement effort. Nothing makes study at once so exhausting and so unprofitable as the absence of any frame-work of registered propositions. Nothing, therefore, can be more fatal to intellectual progress than the random destruction of those ancient formulae which create, as it were, a common language between men; and between the successive epochs of life, both personal and national. The attempt to acquire power and freedom for intellectual pursuits by keeping oneself ignorant of ancestral Theology would seem to be about on a level, for practical efficacy, with the attempt to gain facilities for the study of human life by living like a savage. Even those who wish to explore barbarous regions find that they can do so to more purpose if they carry about with them, in a compact form, a judicious selection of civilized appliances. Setting aside all considerations of religion, the European who is not familiar with the various clauses of the Athanasian Creed gives one the same sense of lack of culture as does an Englishman